The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

Jessica Benjamin's first book asks why people accept, and take part in, relations of domination and submission. Drawing on Hegel's account of recognition, object relations theory and infancy research, it argues that domination grows out of a failure of mutual recognition: the tension between asserting oneself and recognising the other collapses into a split in which one side becomes subject and the other object. The book follows this split into erotic domination, the Oedipus complex and the polarity of masculinity and femininity, and criticises Freud's account of the father as the sole bearer of separation and desire. It appeared in Hebrew in 2005 as כבלי האהבה (Dvir, translated by Tamar Almog).